


AU AU, The

by orphan_account



Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Cursed Pirate Treasure, Curses, Everyone is Bisexual, F/M, Gen, Iowa, M/M, Mother of all AUs, Multi, Multiple Universes, Other, POV Pepper Potts, POV Sam Wilson, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Sam Wilson has a dog, Sam Wilson is a Gift, Sexy Mechanic!Sam Wilson, Time Travel, Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes, World War II, what's in the box???, world war II bucky
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-12
Updated: 2016-09-19
Packaged: 2018-08-08 05:55:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 10,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7745755
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'Those who plunder, be torn asunder.' Cursed pirate gold ain't nothing to sneeze at.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. what's in the box????

**Author's Note:**

> saying this right now that I make zero promises with the listed ships. this story will be a clusterfuck of relationships (among other things) and I can't guarantee any one will be better or worse or more or less prevalent than the others. if you like the story and you desperately want me to cover a ship, or make your ship work, or make it stick around, please comment and tell me so. this story belongs to whoever wants it.

If the collective Avengers had all read more pirate stories as children, they never would have fucked up this badly.

Alas, precocious Natasha had read Bulgakov. Steve had read Jack London. Banner had read Asimov, and Tony, well, Tony had had his nose in textbooks since he could piece together two letters. Clint? Yeah, Clint read a lot of comic books.

The point was that they had no clue what to do with cursed gold.

“Check this out.” Rhodes dropped it at the foot of the stairs, at the base of the burnt out fort in the Ukraine, where the latest sect of terrorists had supposedly been trading plutonium and red mercury. They weren't important. Maybe we'll get to them later. Probably not. Don't worry about it.

“It's a box,” said Clint. He was counting arrows. Natasha was drinking sbiten out of a thermos. Steve was ignoring a head wound and balancing his shield on its edge on his forefinger.

“What's in the box?” he asked.

“‘What's in the box????’” Natasha echoed loudly. At Steve's stare, she said “What? You haven't seen Se7en yet?”

Tony dropped out of the sky, suit streaked with ash. He popped open the helmet. “Why can't they ever hide their underground bunkers on a nice tropical island?” he said. “I would kill for a Mai Tai right now.” He pointed at Rhodey’s discovery. “‘What's in the boxxxx???’”

“Fine,” said Steve. “I'll watch it.”

“You find my red mercury, Rhodes?”

“I found something a little more interesting,” said Rhodey, sounding pleased with himself. They all exchanged glances before gathering around, with the resigned wariness of people who were used to interesting boxes exploding in their faces.

He undid the clasp, and flipped up the lid.

Gold. Gold coins. Even under the gray clouds of this wasteland of the Ukraine, they had a sweet shine to them, and at the same time, a dinginess that spoke of age.

“Well that's disappointing,” said Tony.

“You don't think that's interesting?” asked Rhodes.

“If I wanted gold coins, I would make a phone call and be swimming in them within an hour. Literally swimming in them. Think Scrooge McDuck. What would be interesting would be if you had found any of the materials I was actually looking for. Did you even read the grocery list?”

Rhodes shrugged. “There's nothing down there, Tony. Beyond the defensive munitions, this place is a shell. Nothing but rat bones. Not even the rats are alive.”

“Well that makes exactly no sense,” said Tony. “Anybody have google maps up? We are at the right bunker in the middle of nowhere in the Ukraine, right?”

“They must have moved on,” said Steve. He reached out to take one of the gold pieces, but Tony smacked his hand away like a child.

“Let's do some analysis and make sure they aren't leeching bunker radiation before we start getting handsy, shall we?”

“Look who’s talking, Scrooge McDuck,” said Clint, arms crossed, looking only a little ridiculous in a fluffy parka. “You just want the gold for yourself, don't you, Tony?”

“Calm down, Cortés’s.” Rhodey slapped the lid shut again. “We'll run some scans back at the tower, and if there's no bunker radiation to be found, I'm sure there's a nice numismatist out there who would love to get their hands on these.”

“Numismatist?” repeated Clint, sipping from Natasha's thermos.

“They study currency,” said Steve, still looking at the box. He a strange look on his face.

“He knows what a numismatist is, but he's never seen Se7en,” Tony remarked to nobody in particular.

“Can we go home now?” asked Clint. “I'm freezing.”

-

Sam Wilson was a mechanic. Why wouldn't he be? He always had been. Twenty some years in school, learning a trade, and then he was a mechanic for about the next ten. He had spent all of his adult life and most of his teens with grease on his shirt and his fingers in an engine block.

Sam Wilson was a mechanic, and he lived in Iowa.

He lived in a semi-rural area and spent a lot of time working on trucks. He sold a lot of parts. Plenty of farmers around here did their own fixing, holding their equipment together with prayers and duct tape, but he sold them the parts, and he beat out the dents when their idiot sons went joy riding down back roads with bottles of Jack Daniels and dove into the ditch.

There were still shards of glass under this one's steering wheel, and it wasn't from the windshield, which was only cracked.

He could have said a word to somebody about the underage drinking, the drinking and driving, the preacher’s daughter who had forgotten a little baggie of coke in her dashboard alongside the lip gloss, but he didn't. The people around here were the stupid kind of racist, he thought, not the kind to throw bricks through your window, but it only took one angry white boy with a slap on the wrist to break your new flatscreen. He didn't need that kind of noise.

He cleaned up the broken glass with a little dustpan and threw it out.

When he was done here, he had one more job to do. Someone had managed to hit an owl on the highway, and lucky Sam Wilson had the privilege of pulling the dead animal out of their grille.

Sam Wilson lived in semi-rural Iowa, in a constant sheath of cornfields and the looming risk of spring tornadoes, and he was a mechanic. He always had been.

What was weird about that?

-

Sam lived not completely alone, but with a white dog, one of those shepherdy, livestock guarding shaggy dogs. He hadn't bought the dog. He hadn't adopted the dog. The dog had been sitting on the side of a rutty back road, on the edge of a wheat field, and unlike most back road dogs, hadn't tried to eat Sam's wheels or his face through the window as he passed.

Instead, the dog had sat waiting, and watched him roll up like it had called for an Uber and he was it.

Because Sam wasn't an asshole, he knew a skinny and abandoned dog when he saw one (and out here, he saw plenty), he pulled up, leaned over, and popped open the passenger side door.

The dog hopped up into the cab and he pulled the door shut behind her.

“So,” he said, turning down the radio. “Where to?”

Her name was Rosy, and she stuck around.

Sam Wilson’s home was about twenty minutes from the closest town, which took about five minutes to drive through, and which lay an hour from the closest real city.

His home was nestled in a dip between a corn and a wheat field, both of them currently lush with produce, and it was quiet at night, except for the coyotes.

This night he was up late. He was brooding over a beer on the porch, looking out at his black drive, which was unlit by the new moon.

He had lived here almost his whole life. This had been his aunt’s home. He had grown up climbing these trees, even the damn spruce that wouldn't stop dropping little babies all over his yard, that he had to yank out every spring.

So what was wrong with it?

Rosy, doing the dog thing of lying by his feet, lifted her head and began to growl. She often did, when she heard coyotes. He didn’t hear any now, but then, she had better ears than he did.

“No, Rosy, you can't have any beer. Shut up. You are a dog.”

He poked her with his foot, but she didn't even give him a wistful doggy glance. She was rigid as she looked off into the trees.

He had lived here his whole life.

So why was he suddenly disturbed by the familiar shapes of those trees?

Because, he realized, they were _not_ familiar.

“Come on.” He opened the door, and Rosy scattered inside eagerly, hoping for a second dinner. He was quick to follow, quicker than he should have been, citing something he wanted to call cowardice, but felt instead like a cool and alien wisdom.

The screen door squealed shut, and he closed the second door, and he locked it. Sam Wilson lived in the middle of nowhere, in semi-rural Iowa, and he never locked his door. But that night he locked it.

And not a moment too soon.

Light burst outside his windows, exploding them inwards. There was an ear-shattering ratatat of gunfire, machine gun fire, and sure his corner of the state was full of NRA certified gun nuts, but he didn't know anybody with a goddamn machine gun.

He heard the shouting of men, another enormous explosion, saw blooming firelight, and then as quickly as it had begun, everything stopped. The only sound remaining was Rosy’s vicious barking.

She was so loud that he almost missed the weak knocking at his door.

Sam was no gun nut, but he sure as hell got his shotgun before he opened the door.

He needn't have bothered.

The man at the door was slumped against the frame, blood running out of his dark hair. Blood ran too over his uniform- military, but not modern. Neither was the gun he was barely hanging onto, a scoped M1 carbine. There were dog tags sparkling in the dark red of his shirtfront.

“Jesus,” said Sam.

He swung opened the door, caught the stranger, and hauled him to his couch, laying him down with his head next to one of Rosy’s squeaky toys.

_Fuck_ , he thought. He was going to have to drive this guy to the hospital, no way an ambulance was gonna make it out here through the maze to his porch. But no way his truck had survived that goddamned blitzkrieg. The whole yard was probably ablaze or in pieces.

He went to the window, and there was nothing.

No crater. No shrapnel. His truck was sitting quietly where he had left it by the shed. There was no evidence that anything had happened at all, except for the stranger bleeding on his couch and the shattered glass on the floor.

“What the hell is that?” came a hazy voice.

Sam turned, and the man on the couch wincingly pressed one hand to his head, and pointed the other at his flatscreen.

Rosy carefully stole her squeaky toy back from behind the man’s head.

Sam's first aid was limited to a school credit from years ago, but he guessed that being unable to recognize a television was not a good sign.

He grabbed a clean towel from the bathroom and pressed it to the man's forehead, knowing better than to try and move him without knowing the extent of his injuries. Half his shirt buttons were missing, and when Sam undid the last few, he was relieved to see no gaping wounds, no intestines oozing out onto the floor. “Can you feel anything broken?” he asked.

“No,” said the man, and frowned up at him as though he made even less sense than the television. “Where am I?”

“Middle of nowhere,” said Sam. “You know what year it is?”

“1944.”

“So close,” said Sam. “No. It's 2013.”

The man looked up at him, and Sam looked down at him, and they both had identical expressions on their faces, expressions of _Are you fucking with me?_

“You remember your name, at least?” Sam lifted up the towel to see how much blood there was. Fortunately, the wound didn't seem deep, and the bleeding was already slowing.

“Bucky.”

“What the hell kind of name is that,” muttered Sam, as he was patting his pockets for his phone. Maybe they'd be able to get a helicopter out. He was definitely not handling this one by himself.

But ‘Bucky's’ next question stayed his hand.

“Where's Steve?”


	2. into the abattoir

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> focal characters: steve & sam with a touch of bucky

Sam Wilson met Steve a few months ago. Yes, Sam Wilson was still a mechanic living in semi-rural Iowa, and he always had been. We're still on the same page there.

‘Captain America’ exploded into a nearby cornfield like a meteor or a crashlanded spaceship, and Sam had both in mind when he drove his truck towards the source of the glowing orange light. It was the middle of the night. Because these things always happened in the middle of the night.

Sam wasn't an idiot, he had seen controlled burns get out of control, and he had the fire station halfway dialed just in case. But he had also watched a lot of ET as a kid, and if there was a spaceship, well, he had his Reece's pieces ready.

There was no fire, and the glow had steadily faded as he approached, now fading to nothing. Almost as if it had existed only to lead him here.

Sam got out of his truck.

Half the damn field had been leveled.

It wasn't anything as dignified as a crop circle, it was just half an acre of corn stalks lying flat, the other half standing straight and moving only very gently in the night breeze.

No spaceship.

But _something_ had happened. Some force had smashed through the sky, some light had led him here, and something had leveled half the crop.

The part of his brain that had been born and raised in this state suggested a freak microstorm, an anomalous cloud that had dropped a tornado for half a second, done half an acre’s worth of damage, and dissipated. Stranger weather had happened.

An unfamiliar part of his brain said, _Nah. Temporal displacement event. Tony was right._

But who the hell was Tony?

And that was when the big guy wearing American flag print staggered out of the corn right in front of him.

Sam would have been less surprised if it had been ET himself.

“Um,” he said, lifting his flashlight. The guy was big, blond, carrying an even more yikes-print round shield, his head in his hands. “You okay, man?”

The guy looked up. He looked like he had been shot out of a cannon, because of the shellshock, and the fact that nobody dressed like that outside a circus. He straightened up, raised a hand to squint against the flashlight, said, “Sam?”

“Um, yeah?”

“Oh, thank god,” said the flag man, and Sam had only a second to think, _Hang on a sec, how does this dude know me? Do I have any friends that dress up and go wander around in cornfie-_ before the flag man started kissing his mouth.

Faced with literally the last thing he could have anticipated happening that night, and the fact that the stranger was built and his mouth was warm and soft and knew what Sam’s wanted, Sam just kind of… went with it, until the flag man released him, saying, “I thought you might have been dead. Tony was right. We have to find the last pieces, put them back in the chest. Do you have your wings?”

Oh, so many questions.

“Okay,” said Sam. And put his hand on the stranger’s chest, and gently pushed him away. “First off. Who are you?”

The man only stared at him.

“What's with the duds?” Sam indicated the suit. Probably not the right second question. Probably he should have gone with ‘How do you know my name?’, or, ‘Do you want to kiss me some more?’.

“It's Steve,” said the man. “Steve? You don't remember? Did you get-” And then he seemed to realize something, and an expression of total bleakness came over his face. “This is the wrong place. You don't- you aren't- do you know the Avengers? Are you still the Falcon?”

“I'm Sam Wilson,” he said. “And I have no idea what the hell you’re talking about.”

“Tony? Natasha? Thor? Do you know any of them?”

“Thor from Norse mythology? He came up in some lit class once. We're not like, texting buddies or anything.”

He was joking, trying to bring some levity to the situation before handsome stranger ‘Steve’ succumbed to whatever existential crisis he seemed to be on the verge of. It did not work. Creeping anguish was claiming Steve's face, and he looked down the empty dirt road both ways as though looking for someone left behind.

“I've lost all of them now,” he said in realization.

“Hey,” said Sam, reaching out to grasp Steve's shoulder. Dude was probably nuts, but that pain was real. “Hey. We'll find your friends. It's gonna be fine. You want a ride to the hospital? I can give you my phone if there's a number you can call.”

“I don't need to go to a hospital,” said Steve, and pulled away from his touch, as if it were painful now. “I need to find the darkest place in a twenty mile radius, so I can get back.”

“Yeah, that's definitely sounds like something someone who needed to go to the hospital would say.”

Steve gave him an impatient look, walked over to his truck, and picked it up. The whole thing. With his bare hands.

Holding Sam's dingy pick-up over his head like it weighed nothing, Steve said, “Does this look like I need to go to the hospital?”

“You know, actually, I think you're good,” said Sam, thinking that maybe _he_ needed to go turn himself in for a psych eval.

Steve put down the truck. Dusting off his palms, he said, “Look. I know you… don't know me. This is probably crazy for you. And I'm sorry. But I need your help.

“Will you help me?”

Something in Sam's gut, aside from the part that couldn't not help a stranger if he tried, couldn't help but succumb to those baby blues.

“Okay, Steve,” he said. “What do you need?”

-

They sat in a corner of the bar, which was absolutely dead, Steve wearing one of Sam's coats over the spangliest part of his uniform, and a pair of his muddy boots. Josie was wiping down the bar and giving them a funny look. No way she would have let ‘Captain America’ (yeah, that was apparently what he called himself) in unless he had been with Sam Wilson, who had fixed her Chevy pro bono a month ago.

Sam had gotten himself a beer, but Steve refused anything but water. He pulled a piece of paper out of his breast pocket and smoothed it down over the table. It read:

_Those who plunder, be torn asunder, and to every distant corner, scatter. Only in the darkest place will light play guide through time and space. Return the stolen prize, or, be motes upon the plane, and in pieces remain._

“You write this?” asked Sam. “That's pretty neat.”

“It came with the chest,” said Steve.

“The one full of gold coins, the one which you and your super friends retrieved from a bunker?” asked Sam, making sure he was following the ludicrous story.

“It was buried in with them. It wasn't written in English, at first. It was in what Bruce thought might be Portuguese, until he picked it up and it turned into English. When Natasha held it, it turned to Russian. But apparently the poem still had the same gist.”

“You guys didn't think that fucking around with mystery gold was a bad idea at that point?”

Steve smiled, in a sad, bitter way. “That's what you said then. Or, what he said.” He looked down and away.

Steve didn't have to explain that bitterness. The reason he had kissed him. The surreal implication that in another world, in Steve's insane world of super soldiers and iron men, he had loved some version of Sam Wilson. And now he missed him.

This Sam Wilson wanted to reach out, soothe this insane man in his flag suit who had lifted his truck over his head like an Atlas, pull him into his neck and say, “Hey, it's okay, I'm here.”

But of course he didn't say that. Didn't do that.

He didn't even know him.

“So, this ‘darkest place’,” he said instead, tapping the paper. “That's your way home?”

“I hope so.”

“What does that even mean? ‘The darkest place’.”

“The worst place. As far as we could tell, it refers to the place most closely associated with suffering. Usually physical pain. And almost always within twenty miles of the temporal displacement event. You said you’ve lived here your whole life. Is there any place you can think of?”

Sam thought of the abattoir.

There were only a few real jobs to be had in this corner of the state. There was farming, which was largely hereditary, and largely bullshit. There was handyman stuff - mechanics. Run a grocery store.

And there was the processing plant.

Which was the nicer, more modern way of saying the slaughter house.

He had never worked there, but he had driven by it often. He rolled up his windows against the stink of blood and feces, even though the window didn’t keep it out. Pigs went in, and they didn't come out. He passed the trucks sometimes on the highway, hogs packed nose to ass like sardines, shit running out of the air holes, going to die.

There was a lake of runoff, fenced off, which he had never seen, only smelled. He imagined it was about three quarters water, one quarter blood. He sometimes saw geese or even swans behind that fence, and imagined them rearing their young alongside pools of greasy, clotted water. _Imagine._

That was pretty dark.

“I might have an idea,” he said.

Josie came by, slapped down his onion chips with a disapproving look at his companion. “You doing okay, Sam?” she asked, with a suggestion of _I can have the sheriff here in a minute_ or _My shotgun is twenty feet away, just say the word._ Josie didn't trust loony tunes as far as she could throw them. And this one would be especially hard to throw.

“It's fine, Josie,” he promised. “Thanks.”

She grunted and left them alone again.

Steve had barely looked up from his ominous poem, and now Sam carefully slid the onion chips under his nose.

“Eat something,” he said. “I imagine falling through space-time and lifting trucks takes a lot out of a guy.”

Steve obliged him, looking only a little puzzled by what Sam was passing off as food. “Is this just deep fried pieces of onion?”

“Yep,” said Sam. “Too bad the fair isn't on right now, I could get you deep fried butter on a stick. They have that in your universe?”

“God, I hope not,” said Steve, as he tried an onion chip.

-

The plant was closed, and it would be for about six more hours until the workers began to file in. This did not deter Steve. It did deter Sam, who didn't want his truck on camera. Steve solved that problem nearly by stealing another car.

“I thought you were supposed to be a hero?” asked Sam, watching him hotwire Josie’s Chevy with crossed arms.

“We're just borrowing it,” said Steve, as he got the engine to turn. “You drive. All these back roads look the same to me.”

Sam might have been offended by that if he wasn't pleased that Steve needed his help. Every moment with the bizarre man, who Sam was still convinced was half crazy, felt like the progression of a first date that would culminate in picnics, gold rings, and wedding vows. Which was nonsensical. Steve hadn't touched him since that kiss. Sam didn't bring it up, but some part of him, the intuitive part he was too smart to ignore, insisted that _This was it_.

Sam didn't know who the hell Steve was. He didn't believe the cursed gold story for a second. But he trusted him. He knew that no matter what this guy did, he would trust it. It was a feeling that ought to have been based in years of friendship. But it was based in nothing - only a kiss, and that pricking of intuition, a prickling that insisted that he knew him.

He thought he caught glimpses of something similar in Steve, but, painfully, Steve wouldn't look at him.

They parked the stolen (sorry, ‘borrowed’) car on the outskirts of the plant, and with Sam's wire cutters and Steve's inhuman strength, they got through the fence and the first layer of security, which wasn't so much security as it was an illusion of boundaries and a malfunctioning card reader, where the doors had just been left open.

“If there's a ‘darkest place’, it's probably the scalding tank,” said Sam. “After they slit the throats, they boil the hair off. Heard sometimes they don't bleed out in time and they're still alive. Boiled to death. Pretty bad.”

“Where?”

Sam shrugged. “I vote we follow the smells. Blood stains, if we can find them.”

The facility was largely empty of blood. Sam supposed they hosed everything down and sanitized the fuck out of the floors after every shift.

“So when you kissed me,” he said. “There's another Sam Wilson in your world, isn't there?”

Steve didn't flinch at the question, but it took him a minute to answer. “Yeah.”

“Boyfriend? Husband?”

Steve frowned in a ‘it's personal’ way. “Something like that. I guess I can't say it's none of your business.” He almost laughed. “No Steve Rogers in this one, though, huh?”

“None that I've ever met.”

Sam had been alone for years. He had been drowsily, freely content in being alone. He _liked_ being alone.

But apparently there was nothing like a handsome headcase to make a man rethink his singlehood.

“So what happens when we find the place? You just blast off into space-time again? Back home?”

“I hope.”

They walked silent then, through the halls, the assortment of machinery, still and quiet, and he could only imagine what device was used for what part of the rendering process. Everything was sterile. Here and there, a tiny spot of blood, but there was not much of the abattoir about the unrecognizable bars, levers, presses, only some uneasiness about the chains. The only awful part was the smell.

They found the tanks, or what Sam thought must have been the tanks. There was no scalding water, no pig hair to be sure. At the very least they were at the heart of the plant. The stench of death was almost overpowering. All of the components, the blood, the shit, the sweat, were indistinguishable.

Sam looked at his companion with watering eyes and exasperation. “Okay, Cap, I think we’ve found your ‘darkest place’, and I’m gonna smell like it for a week. You satisfied?”

Steve shook his head. “This isn’t it,” he said. He looked at Sam. “I was wrong. It’s not about physical pain. The truth has nothing to do with dead pigs.”

Why did Steve’s expression make his chest hurt?

His name was Sam Wilson, he was a mechanic, he had lived in semi-rural Iowa his whole life, he had never known a Steve Rogers, he had watched ET a lot as a kid, and why did he feel now like none of that was true at all?

“The truth is that I’m never going to see you again,” said Steve. “That’s why this is the darkest place.”

A gleaming golden coin dropped from nowhere, and clattered on the slaughterhouse floor.

Steve Rogers disappeared. Not in a flash, or a bang.

He just disappeared.

Sam Wilson was alone in the abattoir.

Before, he had just been free.

Now, he was alone.

-

“Where’s Steve?”

Bucky was looking up at him, blood on the side of his face, looking less concerned with his injuries and the invention of the television than the subject of question.

Sam could only shake his head.

“He’s gone.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> kiss count: 1


	3. do svidanija

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> focal characters: pepper & natasha, sam & bucky, with a touch of thor.

Pepper and Nat had a complicated history.

They met in high school. The birthplace of complicated histories.

Natasha Romanoff had been an exchange student. Russian. Obviously. The accent drove the boys crazy- not that she needed the accent for that. She was beautiful. She did ballet. She was every glamorous exchange student cliché jammed into one body. Unfortunately for most of the boys, and some of the girls, she cared about approximately three things: her studies, dancing, and more dancing. Her hair was almost always tucked up in a bun, out of her way. She was distant. Immaculate. Floating.

Pepper Potts was editor of the school paper, top of the track team, and model UN organizer. As a child Pepper had dominated whatever her parents tentatively pushed her towards. Chess tournaments. Spelling bees. Gymnastics meets. Things were no different when she hit high school, tackling both classes and extracurriculars with a juggernautish joy in being good at something. Anything. Everything.

They both had red hair, they both got straight As, and they were exactly the same height. You might have thought they would have fought like cats and dogs. And they almost did.

The high school quarterback committed suicide two months into junior year.

Flying leap, right off the top of the science building.

A week later, Pepper found distant, immaculate Natasha trembling in the locker room. Her hair was still loose and straggly from the shower, but almost dry, and she was sitting in her towel as if she had gotten out of the water and stayed sitting there for an hour.

Pepper had never disliked Natasha (she never allowed herself to dislike anyone without good reason), just resented her in very mild and unseen ways, but Pepper put her coat around Natasha's shoulders immediately and asked, “What happened? Are you okay?”

Natasha Romanoff said, “It was me. It was me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I killed him.”

Everyone knew that the quarterback had asked Natasha to the spring fling. He, like everyone else, had hoped to get his letter jacket around her shoulders, to have her cheering him from the stands. But Natasha had said no. She always said no.

“No, don't be silly,” Pepper soothed. “That's not your fault. You didn't kill anybody.”

Years later, she would learn that she had been both right and wrong.

It hadn't been Natasha's fault.

But she had definitely killed him.

Pepper grabbed Natasha's clothes from her locker, left ajar, and when Natasha had dressed and there was a little more color in her face, Pepper glanced around and reached into her pocket. “Here,” she said. She pulled out a joint. “In his memory.”

They propped a window open in the girls bathroom, jammed the door, and smoked the joint to a scrap of rolling paper. Pepper shared a story about a boy who had actually held a boombox up to her window. She had Natasha laughing, for the first time ever it seemed like. Natasha, she was surprised to find, smiled cautiously, laughed cautiously. Which made Pepper only bolder. She touched Natasha's loose hair, said, "It looks nice like this. You should wear it down more often."

By the time they had flushed the joint down the toilet and covered up the smell with body spray, they were fast on their way to being friends.

Natasha stayed in the States and gradually lost her accent. She wore her hair down more. Pepper decided to pursue journalism outside of school, exposed the corruption of a local politician in her first real stab at it, made some enemies, won some scholarships. Natasha climbed the ballet ladder of success to her own scholarships. Not that either of them _needed_ exploits to earn an open invitation to any university they might have wanted. The doors were already wide open to them both.

With so many options, it was an odd coincidence that they both ended up at the same school. From there it was only natural that they choose each other as roommates. They shared toothpaste and hairdryers. Stayed up until 2am at the all night diner around the corner drinking coffee and going over notes that had been highlighted half to death. Very rarely, Natasha caught Pepper in a spelling error, and very rarely, Pepper caught her in a slip of the ol’ accent, and they would take a break from relentless study to mock each other as only best friends could.

But they would never have called themselves best friends. If they had been forced to put a label on it, they would have said something like ‘colleagues’. Something dry and businesslike. Two people sharing in the juggernautish joy of being good at everything. Two redheads, the exact same height, comparably pretty, delighting in having found an equal.

If they had been asked, they never would have said anything personal. They never would have said anything about shared lipsticks, shared beds. The way they would find red hairs in the damndest places (inside the pillowcase? In the rice cooker?) and how they knew intuitively whose hair it was, through the only slight difference in color and curl. Things like limbing over the fence of the cemetery, lying on a blanket between the graves to watch a meteor shower, holding hands. Natasha had whispered something to her in Russia. Pepper knew only the basics, _dobryj večer_ , _do svidanija_ , and she didn't know what Natasha was saying and she didn’t ask, but later she would spend months poring over Russian phrasebooks, trying to find those words.

When they graduated, Pepper’s future was a yellow brick road of campaign trails, foreign correspondent journalism, and curating fine art.

She asked where Natasha intended to go. Natasha, who had opened just as many doors for herself, with the same cool-headed ferocity, Natasha only gave her a characteristic half smile and kissed her on the cheek.

“Do svidanija,” she said.

And that was that.

It wasn’t unusual for people to drift away after school. It was a big world, with lots of people, and it was easy to lose track of them.

Pepper wasn’t sure why she let herself be surprised by the soft, gentle way that Natasha disappeared. She certainly didn’t let herself cry over it.

Sometimes Pepper thought about her near-twin, the girl trembling in the locker room, their shared joint with its lipgloss stains, that night watching meteors in the cemetery, and what had those words meant?

But mostly she thought about work.

She had gotten her foot in the door in the legal division of Stark Industries. The company had taken a downturn since the untimely death of its young figurehead, but it was still the place to be for anyone on the cutting edge of technology, history, or personal ambition. From behind the scenes, raising in the ranks in her always-sweet but always-right crushing kind of way, Pepper helped to strengthen the wobbling foundations of the company. She helped to rebrand the name Stark. Gave it a humanitarian edge. X products pushed, Y water bottles donated to a small and suffering village. “Tony would have wanted this,” she said smiling into the waves of press, and sometimes she looked at his picture, left hanging as a memory in her new corner office, and she wondered if that would have been true.

Pepper got a nice place. On the edge of the city. Isolated. It was very cold, and modern, full of concrete and reinforced glass, with splashes of Kandinsky and Mondrian on the walls, a stocked wine cellar, and ghosts. Not the kind that moaned or tapped on the walls at night. The kind that muttered inside of her when she looked out the window with her mug of tea, occasionally saw wildlife in the mist, in that garden she had never bothered to hire anyone to tame. She liked the tangled wildflowers and the scattering of birds in the dull morning light. There was impressionism in it. And the ghosts were impressionistic, too. Foggy and ill-defined. A million dots of half-felt emotion that accumulated into… not sadness. But unease.

Her life was playing out perfectly.

So why the ghosts?

She got a clue one morning, when she was cupping her warm tea in her hands, still in her robes, hair loose, bare-footed even though the floor was cold, and the doorbell rang.

Pepper checked her security feed to see who was standing on her front step.

And it was Natasha.

Pepper’s heart gave a funny sort of leap, the kind of leap that was laugh and surprise and apprehension all in one, and she sped to the door with a quickness that was as born out of dread (and why dread?) as it was curiosity.

“Natasha-” Pepper got only halfway through her surprised laughter, giving her old colleague the up and down of ‘I haven’t seen you in ages, you look amazing’ and stopping at her wrists, her wrists and hands and arms streaked in blood.

Natasha was wearing kevlar, a torn jacket, and an ice cold expression. Instead of reaching out to shake hands, she held a gun, and she squared it at Pepper’s chest.

“I need a place to lay low,” she said.

-

Sam Wilson made Bucky eggs.

Sorry - that was James ‘Bucky’ Buchanan Barnes, sergeant. 'Howling Commando'. A comrade of the super soldier, Nazi demoralizer, and war hero Captain America.

Sam would have trussed him up, tossed him in the truck, and driven him to the hospital for evaluation in about ten minutes if he had heard that story a year ago.

But a few months ago Captain America had frenched him on the edge of a temporal-event-blasted cornfield, and so Sam didn’t really have any rebuttals, and so he made the sergeant eggs.

“They’re farm fresh,” Sam said. Awkwardly. Sitting at the table with Bucky, who was wearing his borrowed clothes now, while his uniform whirled in the washing machine with Sam’s socks. That was, his World War Two uniform. With fresh Nazi blood on it, according to Bucky. “That’s okay,” Sam had said. “It’s still wet, we’ll just run it through some cold water.” As if staining was the fucking problem.

Bucky gave him a funny look. He had given Sam nothing but funny looks since he met him, and a few guarded lines. Like- like Sam was some kind of Nazi collaborator, and the 21st century, his flatscreen TV, his smartphone, were all tricks to get him to reveal Captain America’s favorite color or something. He didn’t seem quite as disturbed by his little temporal oopsie as Sam would have expected. But then, if he had time-and-space-traveling Steve as a best friend, maybe he was used to this kind of bullshit.

Sam still wasn’t.

“So, World War Two,” he said. “That’s something. I was just watching a documentary the other night, something about Hitler’s bunker. Pretty cool.”

Bucky, sergeant James Buchanan Barnes the time-traveling friend of the star-spangled superhuman, stared at him, with egg on his fork.

“Oh, you guys didn’t get to that part, did you” realized Sam. “It was- do you want to know how it ended?” Was he supposed to put a spoiler alert on history? _Shit_ , it occurred to him. What if by taking Bucky in, doing his laundry, feeding him eggs, he was somehow altering human history? What if he was fucking up the ending? You would think that if space and time had undone such a pivotal part of human history, he would have heard or seen some sign of it, but hell, this was Iowa. Even if Hitler’s great grandson was ruling the States, he could probably go weeks without hearing about it.

Casually, like he wasn’t suddenly concerned about the fate of America seventy years ago, Sam pulled up wikipedia on his phone, like he was checking the time.

Okay, Hitler was still dead, with no surviving children. That was good.

Bucky shrugged. “You’re here. You’re American, you speak English. That makes it sound like we won.”

Sound logic.

“Do you know how you got here?” ventured Sam, wondering if he was going to hear another tale about cursed gold and preachy poems.

Bucky considered it through a mouthful of egg. “Hydra,” he said. “Their experiments, their technology. Must be. But I don’t know how.”

'Hydra'. More vocabulary that Sam was oh so reluctant to learn.

“Nothing about… gold pieces?”

Bucky stared at him. He stared long enough that Sam almost broke the silence with an offer of “More eggs?”, and then he reached into his pocket, pulled out something that glimmered, and let it drop on the table.

A single gold coin.

“It was just lying on the ground,” he said, and now his voice wasn’t flat anymore, but uncertain. “In the dirt.”

Sam paused for only a second, and then he reached into his own pocket, retrieving the coin that Steve Rogers had left behind in the slaughterhouse. He plinked it down beside Bucky’s.

The two coins glittered sweetly in the morning sunshine, coming in through his kitchen window.

Rosy, lying under the table, began to rumble deep in her throat. She got up, walked to the hall, and turned to stare at them from that vantage point, black eyes beaded on the tabletop.

“Something tells me we’d be better off just burying them again,” said Sam.

Bucky looked more soberly at the two coins. “No,” he said, spreading them with his fingers. “If they have anything to do with this, maybe they can take me back. I have to get back.”

“War to win?” suggested Sam. “Because no offense, but I think they won it without you.”

“It’s not the war,” said Bucky, and Sam had to bite his tongue, because his guest had the same look as when he had first arrived, when he asked his third question after “What the hell is that?” and “Where am I?”. Asking, where was Steve?

Some part of him resented it, because Sam didn’t know where was Steve, and he wanted to know, too. Did he deserve to know more than a man who had gone to war with him in some ridiculous other world? No. But! There was no but. Why did he care?

“Did you know a Sam Wilson?” he couldn’t resist asking. “Back then? A Falcon?”

Bucky didn’t have to answer, his raised eyebrows were enough to say that no he hadn’t, and what was that?

“Nevermind,” said Sam, poking crossly at his eggs.

“We have to be able to use these somehow,” muttered Bucky, picking up the coins, holding them sideways between his fingers. It made Sam uneasy to watch how casually he handled them. They gave Sam the creeps.

“He said that they worked in ‘the darkest place’,” said Sam, with reluctance.

He gave Bucky the bullet points of the poem and how they had sought out the scalding tanks, carefully working around the part where Steve's ‘darkest place’ had been his own departure.

“So we go back to the slaughterhouse,” said Bucky. “If that's the place-”

“I don't think it will work,” said Sam.

“Why not?” asked Bucky, and because Sam couldn't say ‘oh it was because your friend maybe boyfriend and I had a time and space defying connection and losing me was devastating enough to teleport him back out of my world’, he ended up making plans to break back into the processing plant with a sniper from World War Two who had poofed onto his porch, because apparently this was his life now.

He should have known better than to press his luck.

The plant had instituted some new security measures after the last break-in. Without a super soldier to help, the wire cutters didn't count for much. Sam was walking the perimeter with Bucky, who did exactly what you would expect an old timey soldier breaking into an enemy base to do. Bucky was halfway up the fence when the new night guardsmen popped out, with a barking, slavering german shepherd at the end of a leash.

They managed to avoid a mauling. That was something. But it took Sam nearly an hour to convince the sheriff that Bucky was his brother in law, was a big animal rights advocate, was off his meds, was having a fight with his sister, and that was why he didn't have any ID because he had left everything at their place, and that Sam would deal with it and not let it happen again, while Bucky sat in handcuffs in the back of the police car looking both pissed and baffled.

The sheriff let them off with a stern warning that was more of a headshake.

They were about halfway to Sam's home in his truck when Bucky asked, “So when do we try again?”

“Never,” said Sam. “I am done breaking into slaughterhouses. I'm a mechanic, not some kid of really fucked up cat burglar.”

“I'll go without you then,” dismissed Bucky, looking out the window at the broadly stretching corn, the rows disappearing into the total blackness of rural nighttime.

“Bucky-” Sam bit his tongue. “I don't think it's going to help. I don't think that's the place.”

Bucky looked at him now, again with the Nazi collaborator suspicious eyes. “You did a few hours ago.”

There was no way around it. “It wasn't the scalding tanks," admitted Sam. "It was me. It was that he knew me. Or some, version of me.” His voice clicked on his next words. “Somebody he had loved, I think.”

He kept his eyes on the road ahead. Just the twenty feet or so illuminated by his high beams. In case a deer popped out. So he didn't have to look at Bucky.

“Maybe-” He ventured. “I wasn't his Sam Wilson. So maybe he wasn't your Steve Rogers.”

Bucky looked mutely out the front windshield. They both watched the empty road while gravel churned softly under the wheels, and, going slowly down the back road, it was about a mile before Bucky said, “I need a drink.”

Finally. Something he could help with.

Back at his home, he pulled down the whiskey, two shot glasses, and they sat on the couch in front of his flat screen and his scratched up wooden coffee table. They both had a drink.

“So,” Bucky said, two shots in. “Hitler’s bunker?”

Sam put on Netflix. He didn't even have the documentary started before Bucky began asking about what was Netflix, what were the TV shows now, and Sam ended up having to try and explain the existence of technology he used on a daily basis but didn't actually understand. “I don't know, I just call the support people when it won't turn on.”

Four shots in and Sam was telling Bucky about the space race. Bucky found the whole idea ridiculous. “This coming from someone who claims to have teleported from 1944?” demanded Sam. “You want to see a live feed from the international space station right now?”

“I don't know what half the words you're saying,” said Bucky, but he was actually laughing now that he had some whiskey in him. “Huh.” He stopped laughing. He looked at the ceiling thoughtfully as something occurred to him. “Everyone I know is probably dead.”

Sam was a little too drunk to remember how to do sympathetic properly. “You don't know, man. Maybe they don't even exist on this side. Never even born.”

Bucky silently refilled both of their glasses. Sam took his. “You know what you really need to see,” he said, tossing it back, still forgetting to be sympathetic. “The Thriller video.”

Bucky took Sam's glass away, turned his head with his hand, and kissed him on the mouth. The whiskey breath was potent.

“That's awfully modern of you,” said Sam, pulling back.

“Everyone I know is dead,” Bucky said again.

“Sorry,” said Sam, wondering fuzzily if Bucky was counting Steve Rogers as one of the fallen, then wondering exactly who and where Steve Rogers was, as he wrapped an arm around Bucky's waist and pushed him back into the couch.

This close he thought he smelled something foreign on him, maybe gunpowder, maybe it was Nazi blood.

He kissed him back nicely, in a ‘I'm sorry your friends and family are dead or in another universe and you're stuck here in Iowa’ kind of way, but Bucky began to rapidly unbuckle his pants, and then he forgot about being nice and forgot about pretty much everything else. It was easy to imagine that he had picked up a stranger and that it was a normal, 21st neck he was laying hickeys on, and he did. He stripped off Bucky's shirt. He pretended that he didn't feel odd scars on his chest, or hear the jingle of the dog tags Bucky was still wearing, as he pushed him down flat on the couch that still had a faint dark stain of his blood on it. Bucky put a hand down his pants, the other on the back of his neck. And Sam got pleasantly distracted from his weird life for the next forty minutes, at least.

He woke up in the morning in his bed with a hangover banging him over the head. Bucky was in his bed too. Small dark bruises prominent on his neck and the shoulder turned towards Sam, his face still buried in the pillow. Dog tags still dangling, the thin chain gleaming in the small light coming through the window.

Sam sighed.

He looked over at Rosy, who was curled up in the small corner of the bed they had left her, giving him a reproachful look. It was an hour after she usually got her breakfast.

Sam wrestled on his pants and went down to the kitchen to put a cup of kibble down for the dog, and he started making coffee.

He made the mistake of looking out his kitchen window.

“Oh, what the fuck," he said.

There was another giant blond man standing in his yard. This one was wearing an incomprehensible costume, complete with a cape, and holding a massive hammer. He was feeding Sam's chickens.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> kiss count: 2  
> bone count: 1


	4. four darks in red

Banner and Tony had conspired to build a new little scanner for the treasure chest. Scanning for what, Rhodey couldn't imagine. They had already ruled out any lingering radioactivity. No toxic materials. The box was just wood. The coins were just gold. But anytime someone got a little too close, Bruce practically slapped their hands away, as if anticipating something, but with an expression that said he had no idea what he was anticipating. Unease.

It probably had to do with the poem.

‘Those who plunder, be torn asunder.’

It was cheesy.

But considering the age of the coins and the box, their odd origin, the fact that the coins themselves were not printed in English, the fact that the note was written on plain paper apparently unperturbed by the passage of time, it was... uneasy.

“We have better things to do,” said Tony, after the third day of scrutinizing the box and its contents. “I'm not Indiana Jones, and this isn't plutonium. Why don't we just drop this at the nearest museum and get back to preventing nuclear winter? Sound like a good idea to anyone else?”

“I don't know, Tony,” said Bruce, brow furrowed. It hadn't been unfurrowed since the question of the gold first arose. “Something about this just bothers me. All those leads to the Carpathians. There was so much money just running through there. Then, nothing. Nobody. But the trail couldn't have been clearer.”

“I'm with Banner,” Rhodey found himself agreeing. “I don't want to waste time playing detective, either, but I say we don't just dump this on some museum curator.”

“The vault, then?” shrugged Tony,

“You boys are so mundane.” Natasha had waltzed in unseen. “Who doesn't enjoy a good mystery?” She whisked the slip of a poem out of Bruce's hand. “Besides, you don't think maybe there's a clue somewhere to help you find your illicit nuclear dealers?”

“Okay, Nancy Drew,” said Tony, crossing his arms obstinately. “What do you make of it?”

She was skimming the note with a faint crease of a frown. “I'm surprised you guys didn't call me in to translate.”

“What do you mean?”

“it's in Russian.”

The three of them exchanged glances.

“No, it's not,” said Bruce, in a lower, more worried voice.

Raising her eyebrows, she flipped the note around and held it up so the three of them could see.

Russian.

Tony snatched it back, and in his fingers, the letters slid smoothly back to english. “Shit,” he said.

Something cold and unfamiliar crawled up Rhodey's spine.

“The vault,” he agreed.

-

They were loading the box, its treasure and its strange letter, into a box of Stark and Banner design when the others joined them. Rogers and Wilson joined at the hip as usual. Lang with a half finished ice cream cone. Barton was there, not on duty (was that guy retired or not?), but with an air of having been called in by Romanoff to witness. He joined her leaning on the wall in silence. Thor was absent. No surprises there.

Rogers and Wilson were laughing about something, looking suspiciously postcoital, which Rhodey and the others didn't remark on, no more than they remarked on Pepper’s continued, conspicuous absence, or the late nights Tony lately kept up with Banner, alone in the lab. There had been a lot of conspicuous silences lately.

“What's this?” asked Rogers. “You're just going to lock it away? What about the red mercury dealers?”

“We can't connect it to them, conclusively,” said Banner, who had come down heavy on the ‘yep, let's lock it up’ side of things. “If it proves to have some relevance we can always bring it up again.” He didn't mention the strangeness of the note; none of them had who had witnessed the change mentioned it. There was something peculiar and uneasy about that, too: Rhodey felt an almost physical hold on his tongue.

Rogers looked disappointed. Maybe because they had lost their best and most recent lead. Maybe he had been looking forward to the mystery.

“That's too bad,” he said.

Rogers approached the box, and for whatever reason, nobody said a word, or moved to stop him.

He reached in and plucked up a single golden coin.

The fluorescent lights bounced off of it, triumphant.

“Souvenir?” he suggested.

And then he disappeared.

-

Natasha had briskly turned Pepper’s neat bathroom into something resembling a slasher movie set. She had washed blood out of her hands and hair, abandoned her clothes in the bath, where they floated in blood-pink suds. A long strip of a belt, full of knives, was slung over the shower curtain. Natasha had two more guns, one holstered under her arm, the other on her thigh. The third she still held casually, keeping Pepper hostage in her own bathroom. As if she weren't too numb from shock to flee.

Natasha's body was covered in scars. Old bullet holes. What must have been healed stab wounds. One long, arcing score beneath her left ear. Pepper that nauseatingly of the bundle of arteries that lay just underneath.

“Natasha, what happened?”

Natasha hadn't said a word to her, nothing more than “move” or “Where's the bathroom” or “Don't move”. She spoke a new language now, not English or Russian, but the language of cold eyes, head jerks, and pointed guns.

“I need to borrow clothes,” said Natasha. “It looks like we're still the same size.”

“They're in the bedroom,” said Pepper, and with an edge, “I guess you'll probably want to keep the gun on me?”

Natasha didn't say a word, no hint of her old half-hidden smile. “Go,” was all she said, and she did follow Pepper to the bedroom.

It was surreal. The cold hallway, Natasha half naked but for guns and underwear, bare feet on the concrete, hair wet and dripping leaving a small trail in their wake. A big, gory Rothko on the wall.

Pepper's bedroom was almost embarrassingly modest. She had kept the crisp linens of her childhood, hadn't made the switch to silk. The oak furniture was individually constructed by a local artisan, a nice man with a beard and an armful of kids. His wife had a garden and made jam and local honey. She had given Pepper that vase, robin's egg blue, the one spot of decoration in the cream-colored room. The only color really Pepper needed came from her one large window. It faced the trees. Her wild garden. The sun, when it was rising.

She pulled a set of clothes from her drawers, holding them up silently for Natasha's approving head jerk (not a nod anymore). A pair of joggers, a t shirt, a hoodie. The kind of clothes you could run in. Pepper laid them out on the bed.

Natasha seemed to have trouble keeping her eyes off of that window. Looking for whoever she was hiding from, maybe.

When she did allow her eyes to run over the room, they stopped on the top of the armoire.

Pepper had a small cluster of framed photographs there. A family photo. Some pictures of her niece and nephew. Her mother and father in their oval-shaped frame, arm around shoulder, smiling from some pier.

And there was a picture, old by now, of Pepper and Natasha. Both smiling for the camera from underneath graduation caps. Pepper smiling broadly, Natasha smiling in her quiet, half-tucked way.

Natasha stared at the picture.

Then she sank down onto the edge of the bed, beside the clothes that Pepper had laid out for her, and she dropped the gun. She put her head in her hands.

Instinct took over, and just as she had over a decade ago in that high school locker room, Pepper sat down and put an arm around her.

“Natasha,” she said. “What happened?”

“I shouldn't have come here,” said Natasha. “I've put you in danger.”

“Why are you in danger?” She almost said _we can call the police_ , but she knew instinctively that there was nothing about this that the police could help with. She temporarily contemplated her private security at Stark Enterprises.

“I'm not the person you thought I was,” said Natasha. Her shoulders were rigid under Pepper’s arm, as if some part of her recoiled from it, but she didn't move. “I'm not the person anyone thought I was. Least of all me.”

“People are complicated,” was all Pepper could offer, having no idea what Natasha was talking about, but knowing this, at least, was true.

“How's this for complicated?” Natasha lifted her head and her expression was completely changed, halfway to laughter. “Do you remember Mike Kinnison from East High?”

“He jumped off the science building.”

“I pushed him,” said Natasha, with no qualms in her voice. This was something she had already come to terms with. A long time ago, it felt like. “I didn't understand why, then. They were just testing their programming.”

“'They'?” repeated Pepper, wanting to repeat ‘programming’.

“My handlers, back in mother Russia,” said Natasha, with deep sarcasm in her last words. “They trained me to kill. Sent me abroad to do it. Made me forget. I forgot… for a long time. By the time I got clarity, I had a body count.”

She looked at Pepper to see how she was taking the information. Pepper could only blink with her mouth slightly open, and the realization that something about this story made an awful kind of sense.

“I have no handlers now,” said Natasha coldly. “But I have enemies. And I have this.” She reached into her holster, pulled out a shiny gold coin encased in plastic. “I don't know who wants it, but I know they want it badly, because they've sent-”

She stopped.

She turned her head, listened to the silence of the house, looked out at the unkept garden.

“Most call him a ghost story,” said Natasha grimly. “But I've got two holes in my kevlar that say otherwise.

“They call him the winter soldier.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> no new additions to the bone or kiss count :( but i updated!


End file.
